Those who are following me will know I'm on a personal journey. I have come very, very far in the last year. I have changed and evolved. I have learned so much. Reflected. Thought. In short I have grown. And it's accelerating.

This journey of self-discovery I am on is entirely down to LinkedIn. Simply because the way I exploit the system has allowed me to become connected with some truly extraordinary people. Extraordinary people I would never ever have met, intersected or collided with, by any other means.  Whether they were like ships which passed in the night or they resulted in long time fellow travellers, these encounters of the extraordinary kind have slingshotted me each time, turboboosted my rate of growth.

Who I am today, who I will grow into tomorrow, could not possibly be without LinkedIn.
 
So let's get this straight. LinkedIn the software is rubbish and amateurish, full of bugs and really annoying. LinkedIn the company is loopy, self-interested, displaying serious signs of insanity and is wasting our time and resources for no good reasons. But forgetting all that for now, disregarding these silly people, Link In with the right professionals and it does change us forever. The connectivity we achieve here matters. It really, really does.. There are ripple effects to all this which are being amplified in to tidal waves. Changing the world.

This then is what LinkedIn is actually for. Like minds attracting like minds. When extraordinary minds collide, sparks fly, igniting impossible ideas.
This place is a furnace which keeps forging me anew.
I am folded steel.
I'm on fire...

...These very Words are testament to themselves. This post-as-poetry, I would not have even be able to express even yesterday. Isn't this extraordinary even in of itself?

The truth of what I'm saying about my own journey is written in the grafitti of the comments, no, the feedback, on these, my LinkedIn Publications, just a very small sample of which now make up the mainstay of my LinkedIn Profile.

This is a point of realization I wish to share with you. We forgot the importance of word-of-mouth. LinkedIn made us all into narcissists.

Profiles have become all about I. We need to step back and re-evaluate. We need to address this. Use our common sense.

You can use your profile to tell me about how good you think you are, what your qualifications are, but what do I care? As a LinkedIn expert extraordinaire, I know all the tricks-of-the-profile-trade. Hell, I invented quite a lot of them. I see through them all.

When I look at your profile, I really don't care about your past career history, I want to know who you are right now.
What's your story?
Where are you on your own particular journey?
But most importantly: who vouches for you, who tells me that you're extraordinary?